


Along Crooked Edges in the Land of Rain

by phantasmist



Category: Boruto: Naruto Next Generations, Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Fluff, Good Akatsuki (Naruto), M/M, Mpreg, Multi, Smut, gender fluidity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-20
Updated: 2017-12-27
Packaged: 2019-02-17 15:22:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13079745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phantasmist/pseuds/phantasmist
Summary: It is an honor to wear the black coat with the red clouds. Itachi joins the Akatsuki under kinder circumstances.





	1. Itachi

It is an honor to wear the black coat with the red clouds, and so when Itachi joins up with the Akatsuki his parents are proud of him. His last night in the village, the Uchiha district throws a party that lasts well into the morning hours. When the sun rises the next day and the man Yahiko shows up to fetch him, the streets are still scattered over with colorful trash and scorched from fireworks.

"Hey!" Obito, in his own black cloak, runs to catch up with Yahiko. He ruins the formality of the moment by crashing up the front steps of the house and flinging his arms first around Itachi himself, and then around his mother and father--as if they weren't the heads of the clan and owed a hundred times more respect than that. "Hey, Uncle Fugaku! How come I didn't get a party like this when I left? What the heck?"

"You're not exactly next in line for leadership of the clan, are you?" Shisui, standing on Itachi's other side, squinting and wincing unhappily from a hangover, points out. He staggers back a step, but isn't fast enough to avoid getting grabbed. "Don't!" he complains sharply, as Obito pins him under one arm and brings a gloved hand down to mash and ruffle up his curls. Thankfully, the two of them overbalance and trip from the edge of the porch an instant before one of them--probably Shisui--ignites a spark and a loud, fiery sparring match breaks out.

Fugaku watches with a strained expression and then sighs and drags his attention back around to their visitor, ignoring the scene with the unflinching and total suddenness of many years of practice. He offers a steady bow to Yahiko--who looks uncomfortable, the way most people who aren't familiar with the clan get uncomfortable when faced with scenes of close kinship between Uchiha. It's that look that says--is this normal? Should someone try to stop this? 

"Itachi," Fugaku says. He doesn't reach out. He's never been that kind of father. But he smiles, just briefly, and his gaze holds warm and steady. "Make us proud."

"And for goodness sake, take care of your poor cousin," Mikoto adds.

"Yeah, don't worry Aunt Mikoto, I will." Obito slams back into the group, throwing a protective arm over Itachi's shoulders. "He's safe with me."

Itachi reaches up between them and pinches the tattered ends of Obito's hair, where it's hanging out long around the edge of his mask--slightly on fire.

\--------

Sasuke doesn't come out to say goodbye. But he's waiting down the road, of course, at the edge of the district, just beyond the trees.

Yahiko gives a short sigh. He's a patient man, Itachi thinks--but they've already been stopped by people all down the path, from the main house to the last little shop. Everyone up early enough to lie in wait for a special farewell. And aside from Itachi's leaving, Obito is chatty and meddlesome. He makes them wait outside while he takes the broom from an old woman and finishes sweeping her kitchen for her. He finds out there's a new baby at a house two blocks over and forces them to go there so he can hold it. He flirts shamelessly for half an hour with the girl whose family owns the bakery. Worst of all, there is a young dog with a hurt paw, a stray--and it's getting well on toward noon, by the time Obito has fed it enough snacks from the deep pockets of his Akatsuki cloak to befriend it. And so Yahiko is already looking somewhat strained, with Itachi waving a final goodbye to his last neighbor and Obito ambling along holding the scruffy hurt mutt in his arms--when they finally reach the edge of the district, and there's Sasuke.

"It won't take long," Itachi promises.

He and Sasuke already said everything they needed to say to one another, after all. It isn't like Itachi leaving the village is something unexpected. They've had every long, shimmering summer day together to prepare for it. And just as many nights, sneaking out to sit by the edge of the lake, or to lie together on the roof of the house and count the stars, or just to be side-by-side in the quiet darkness of Itachi's room, stretched out on his bed together.

"I still wish..." Sasuke begins as Itachi approaches, and bites his lip, stopping himself. He's still such a little child. But he's like their father, Itachi thinks. Already. Proud and serious. 

"It will be all right," Itachi assures him. "I'll visit all the time."

He brushes his fingertips over his brother's forehead. Sasuke swats at his hand, but steps forward and puts his arms around Itachi's neck and hugs him fiercely.

"You guys are going to make me cry," Obito says behind them, with a little wobble in his voice like he really might. He cradles the dog a little closer to his chest. It's of course a shinobi animal, keener than a normal dog--and it gives a single bark, in a tone of agreement.

\--------

How might things have gone in another world? Where suffering ran deeper. If this had all been a crueler choice. If they had each lost more. Itachi can imagine it. He knows what he might have been--what every one of them might have been, but for chance.

\--------

"I'll be your partner."

The man finds him perched at the end of a hallway, in the Tower. Hidden Rain is very different from Leaf. Itachi is used to clear skies, green hills and sunlight. But it's all gray, here. It never seems to stop raining. The buildings are up on stilts. Many of the streets aren't streets at all, but deep canals. Bridges and thick cables crisscross the whole village, and to race over them and get from one place to another requires a surefootedness and focus that's like trying to step over a rapid, moving stream. Some routes don't lead anywhere at all. The whole place is confusing, and the Tower is the worst of all. Whoever built this place, in Itachi's opinion, ought to be punished. The Akatsuki headquarters is a maze. Doors lead to nowhere. Floors aren't installed in every place they ought to be. The architecture narrows to claustrophobic tunnels and winding staircases in some places, and expands to vast halls and arenas in others.

He can't quite decide if he hates it here, or not.

Currently, he's sitting at the end of a long hallway. Where there ought to have been a door, everything simply drops away, and there's a cavern beyond with a floor many stories below and a roof many stories above. A freakish, monolithic statue hangs out over the whole area, eyes bulging and tongue extended. A demon. Itachi had sat down to begin with just to look at the thing, and to listen to the soft roar of yet another storm beyond the walls. But he stayed for another reason.

"Ah?" the big man coming up behind him says, noticing. He quiets his steps and slips down to sit at the edge of the hallway beside Itachi with surprising grace, for someone so large. The sense Itachi gets of his chakra is impressive. Like something in the woods at home, an old tree or a deep natural wellspring, or a standing stone. A place where energy has been collecting naturally for a hundred years. Itachi has never felt anything like that, coming from a person. The man muffles it, seals the chakra away within himself to hide his presence, as he looks down over the edge of the hall at the scene Itachi has been watching.

"Partner?" Itachi asks.

"Yes," the man answers. "They told you, didn't they?"

They did. Itachi nods. This is a man from the Mist, he can tell. What's most noticeable about him is his height, and the broad raw strength of him. His skin is bluish, and his dark hair too. Across each cheek are neat, deep gashes. When his lips part, the teeth that show are pale and deadly pointed, every one.

"Kisame."

"Itachi."

They regard one another. Itachi isn't sure what he expected. Not this, exactly. And whatever Kisame thought he would be getting as a partner, Itachi seems to surprise him as well. The man stares for a few long moments. His eyes are metallic. Silver, aquatic. A sea creature's eyes, for taking in bare traces of light far underwater, for hunting prey in the weightless depths.

"Your cousin speaks highly of you."

"Does he?"

"I thought you'd be more like him."

"There's nobody else like him." Itachi turns his attention back down to the scene below. In the wide empty arena, beneath the ugly statue, three figures: One isn't real, he doesn't think. It's a puppet. A dead or wooden person, with ball-joints showing, with almost invisible traces of thread running away from it--away and away, out of sight. Such threads trail throughout the entire headquarters. There is a puppeteer somewhere, Itachi thinks. A craftsman, who tugs along these false people, who leads them about their tasks according to his whims. He hasn't met him yet. It could only be someone a little bit insane. Because the things the puppets do, they don't make sense. Like this one, now. It has a stringed instrument in its lap. Its dead or wooden fingers are plucking the strings, producing a melody.

It was there alone when Itachi first came to the end of the hallway. Playing for nobody. But two people entered the room after a while, arguing. Both in the long dark cloaks, one--Obito--clearly a little drunk, or something, throwing his arms around, shouting. The other following more slowly, bickering more quietly. Itachi wasn't sure quite what the fight was about. It dissolved a little bit after they noticed the musician anyway. The taller man--gangly, pale, with a mess of white hair, with one gray eye and one pinwheel red one--said something. Obito replied. The tall man made a gesture. Obito laughed, startled and raspy.

Itachi had not known his cousin was in love. It was fascinating, to see them put their arms around one another. Obito--who is taller and stronger than most Uchiha men--looks almost fragile, against that pale stranger. He lets himself be dragged along on tip-toe, in the embrace of the other. Moved to the sound of the puppet music. Like they're dancing together. Slow, ridiculous--so utterly private a thing that Itachi is embarrassed to see it, and yet he doesn't want to look away. He has never seen his older cousin tamed, quieted, soothed before. He has never noticed Obito's despair until this moment, when for the first time, briefly, he sees it vanish.

"It's funny, isn't it?" Kisame asks, beside him. "Seeing who people really are."

"I've only seen it before as they die."

"You seem young, for that."

"Do I?" He isn't. Not for a shinobi. But maybe, to this monster of a person from the Hidden Mist, the smallness and delicacy of an Uchiha makes adolescence look like childhood. At any rate, he does know what it's like, to see somebody die. To kill them himself, even. And hear their last words, see the last expression on their face, and feel the last lightning strike of their chakra before it's gone forever. There is no deceit then. Not in the moment before death. It's real and it's honest, it's important. And Itachi had supposed that other such moments might exist, that perhaps sometimes they came unbidden by violence or desperation, came gently, came softly--but he's never witnessed it, before now.

Down in the distance, the pale man pushes Obito's mask off. The eyes beneath it are closed, the lips parted slightly. Like he's sleeping, or entranced. He hangs in the grasp of the other, loose. Inebriated. The man kisses both Obito's closed eyelids, and it makes Itachi's skin crawl with shocked alarm to see it. Those eyes--one of them, anyway--are probably one of the fiercest, most powerful weapons in the shinobi world. And any Uchiha's eyes are all their power and their inheritance, anyway. To let someone else put their mouth, their teeth, so close to the corneal surface, the spinning iris, the deep pupil, the ocular lens--it's horrifying. Itachi has never, ever seen an Uchiha display such foolish trust in another person, even a clansman.

"Hoy!" Someone else leans through a doorway, far below. "Get a room, you assholes! You know how long I've been trying to track you down? Boss wants you!"

"They're in Whirlpool," Obito snaps, straightening up and drawing away from the other man, facing the intruder. "If they need us, can't they just use the rings?"

"Not Yahiko and them. The other--you know, the boss. The _bossssss_."

"Oh," says Obito.

"Hm," says Kisame, quietly. When Itachi turns to him, he only raises his eyebrows, and jerks his head to indicate the two of them should retreat back down the hallway.

\--------

Itachi wakes up when someone undoes the lock on his door and stumbles into his quarters. He opens his eyes, but doesn't move or speak until Obito falls down into bed beside him.

"It's late."

"Sorry. Ouch--what the hell. What is this?" Obito fishes around in the blankets and pulls out the books Itachi was reading before bed, stares at them in offense, and then drops them over the other side of the mattress. There's a huge library, here in the Tower. One of the higher-up members of the organization, the man who also does the accounting, guards the place. He's severely well-educated, and also some kind of weird tentacle monster pretending to be human. Itachi doesn't want to know what a person like that might do if books were returned to the collection damaged. He grabs the last volume before Obito can pitch it away with the others, and stuffs it under his own pillow to keep it safe.

"What a nerd."

"There are ancient jutsu that can only be learned by--"

"Ugh. Stop, you sound like Orochimaru."

"Well, it's true."

"You know what I can solidly recommend, if ancient jutsu is your thing? Get crushed by a rock and abandoned in the woods on enemy territory until some scary old man digs you up and keeps you prisoner in his freaky tree cave for a year. It's a--what would you call it? An immersive learning experience. Very effective."

"Is that the person who's really in charge around here?" Itachi asks. "Him? Not Yahiko, Konan and Nagato?"

Obito goes silent. Itachi waits, until so much time has passed that he thinks probably his cousin isn't going to reply. He lays his head down on Obito's chest. It's intimate--but that's how things are, between kinsmen. The slow beat of his cousin's heart, the hush and pause of his breath, is not an unfamiliar sound. The scars, the deformity is still startling, after all this time. But Itachi has run his fingertips over the grooved, crooked seams before. And he does it again now, exploring the warped edges of his cousin's flesh. The ruined, rebuilt half of him. Their shared ancestor's careful handiwork. He follows a jagged line up the throat, to the side of the jaw that was crushed and mended, the edge of the lip that was split, the cheek with its uneven runnels. And, curiously, he props himself up on his elbows and looks down into his cousin's eyes. The one with its deep awakened power, the other that's dark and ordinary. A transplant.

Itachi is not an impulsive person. Not at all. He plans, he calculates, he guards himself. So it surprises him too, when he leans forward without thinking, as if to press a kiss somewhere near that deadly pinwheel eye. It's only a slow move, and so Obito's reaction is languid also--to grunt, to twitch, to turn his head away from the contact, one side of his mouth curling upward in amusement. A little bit wary.

"What?" he asks.

"Nothing." Itachi says. And they watch each other, and then press their mouths together instead. A soft, chaste kiss. Friendly, tender. Nothing serious.

"Hey," Obito says, grinning. "You want to meet him, then?"

"Who?"

"The boss." Obito wiggles his eyebrows up and down. He looks down at his hand--the restructured hand, and touches the fingers of it to the ragged, ugly side of his face. "You know," he says. "The _bossssss_. Him."


	2. Kakashi

It got to him. Sure it did. But Kakashi kept to himself, in those few years after Rin died. And nobody--nobody but one person, accidentally--ever saw how badly he really handled the whole thing.

You don't get to go crazy just because life sucks. Every single one of them would be stark raving insane, if that was allowed. All the shinobi in Hidden Leaf. In any of the villages. They are the military forces for each of their respective countries. The agents of war. And war is terrible. People do crack up, once in a while. When it gets to be too much. But they don't go crazy, exactly. They go missing-nin. Or they retire to a civilian township and do who knows what there--restart life as neurotic merchants or tradesmen, maybe. Or, they kill themselves.

He could have done it. Might have. He isn't sure.

It was the nights that were the worst. Because he kept dreaming it all over again--in shades of red and black, fast, loud. When it's Rin, the whole visceral experience of her death just repeated. The instant of their decision, the way the shattered jagged edges of her bone cut him as he struck her through, and how he felt the last hot pulsing of her heart and lungs closed tight around his wrist. Same with Obito. Those dreams, they were just everything that had really happened happening over again. If he dreamed about his father, things were softer, but then it was almost worse. Because he dreamed of the darkened house, of walking through each room looking for Sakumo, and of finally coming upon the pool of blood on the floor and thinking, knowing-- _I did this._

Jiraiya was the one who caught him one night, sitting out on his front porch with his head in his hands.

"Ah, kid," the old sage said. He approached in a cloud of sweet pipe smoke, and brushed his roughened fingertips over the crown of Kakashi's head. "This is cruel, you know? I can't stand it."

"What's cruel?" Kakashi leaned back, scrubbing his wrist across his eyes.

Silence, while the man smoked and looked out into the starry darkness over the village. He nodded finally, back down the path, the way he himself had just come. "Go talk to Orochimaru. You know where he lives? Right now. Hurry up."

"Why?" Kakashi hadn't even known Orochimaru was back in the village. He had been gone, working with some freelance mercenary group that was starting up, for months.

"Go on."

So he did. In the middle of the night, he went to the house Orochimaru kept at the very edge of the village, away from everyone else. The lights were still on inside. Kakashi knocked, and the beautiful white snake opened the door for him. Those yellow, bruised eyes. That scent, that silken hair that fell all down over his shoulders thick and dark as if it was soaking wet. He was wearing a long dark coat with red clouds on it. Behind him, seated at a table, was a much younger person. Similarly dressed, but with a mask patterned with flame.

"Hey," that person said, startled. And when the mask tilted up, through the single eye hole, a bright red eye that was the floret mirror of Kakashi's own flashed in the lamplight.

\--------

He didn't have any choice but to join the Akatsuki. It wasn't so bad--not all of them were idealists. Many had donned the black coat for money, or the pursuit of other personal gains, and a few had been blackmailed into it. Kakashi told himself he was doing it because his friend was an idiot, and he wanted to keep an eye on him. Keep him safe. That was bullshit, of course. He couldn't fool himself entirely. For one thing, what kind of a track record did he really have, for keeping people safe? He was the worst at it. The absolute worst. To keep Obito safe, the best thing he could probably have done was to stay far away from him.

So truthfully, his motivations were more selfish. He didn't think he could survive another separation. He didn't want to try.

\--------

"You just won again? Shit, seriously?" Hidan throws his cards down and bangs both fists against the table as Kakashi reaches out and sweeps another pile of coins over toward his end of things. He is not, in fact, doing any better than Kakuzu or Sasori. And Kisame had had a few good hands, since the start of the game. Hidan's not a bad player himself--his luck, his very cognitive savvy, just seems to swing up and down. Tonight, he is on a spectacular losing streak.

"What do you have to spend it on, anyway?" Sasori asks, gathering the cards back up and beginning to shuffle them.

"Here in Rain? Sad, wet hookers," Hidan snaps. "What else?"

"The food's good here," Kisame remarks, leaning back, tipping the last drops from the bottle in front of him past his lips.

"If you like fish."

"Of course he does."

"No, no. That noodle place, it's right down the street--what's that place?"

"Oh, yeah wait. They've got good stuff."

"Psst," Sasori says, knocking a ball-jointed elbow sideways into Kisame's arm and nodding off toward the dark to the left of them. They're gathered in an anteroom that--like many of the rooms in the headquarters--connects off in odd ways to other halls and chambers. The ceiling is high. There's a walkway run around part of it, way over their heads and off away from them. Two figure just stepped out onto it. All of them go still and watch.

"Your new partner," Sasori remarks. "Cute kid. What's he like?"

"Quiet," Kisame answers, as the group of them watch Itachi being dragged along by Obito, out from one doorway and up a flight of stairs toward another. "And smart." 

"Uchiha are batshit insane," Hidan remarks.

"They're not." Kakashi frowns.

"Yeah?" Hidan sneers, unconvinced. Even in Leaf, where all of them live and mingle, the Uchiha have a shady reputation. Kakashi knows it well enough. What he didn't ever understand until joining up with this organization was that other villages had their own opinions about the clan. At best, they are considered a somewhat reformed gang of dangerous lunatics. At the very worst, in places distant from Leaf where memories of the old militia wars still linger, the Uchiha are treated as a sort of boogeyman. Literally. Like, be good kid, or an Uchiha will show up while you're sleeping and steal your eyeballs, kind of boogeyman. Kakashi was startled to laughter, the first time he heard that one. He supposes it isn't really very funny.

"Right, ante up."

"I'm out for tonight," Kakashi proclaims, snatching his winnings away into the pockets of his cloak. Dog food money. He has to fumble to get it stowed. He's got the sleeves of the uniform tied around his waist, the tight black undershirt showing on top, the rest dragging and rumpled around his legs.

"Hey," Kisame says, nodding up toward the doorway the two Uchiha just vanished through, guessing where Kakashi's on his way to. "Don't let that maniac traumatize the new recruit, all right?"

Like it's not already too late for that, probably. "They're related somehow," Kakashi says, shrugging. "I'm sure it's fine."

\--------

He doesn't quite make it in time to stop them, so he waits in the hallway, and eventually the door to the high tower room opens and the boy steps out. He doesn't seem traumatized. Kakashi, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, studies him. The kid--Itachi--just gazes silently right back, like he's not even surprised to see him there. Obito seems delicate, to Kakashi. The fine-boned litheness of him, the strange feline loveliness. But it's nothing, it's rough, compared to Itachi. Kakashi is sure he's never seen someone so fine and frail. The Uchiha, they're all gorgeous--but in a keen, pathetic, repellent sort of way. Kakashi's opinion? Inbreeding. A lineage kept so pure it's poisoned the whole lot of them.

Maybe he shouldn't think that. But you know, if you grow up in Leaf, you just pick up some of those prejudices people have. Even if you don't hate the Uchiha, even if the love of your life and the very twin of your soul is an Uchiha--you still look at one, and even though you don't mean to, you think--he is so very beautiful and so strange because his parents were probably cousins, and their parents were cousins, and so on, all the way back to Madara.

Itachi offers a small little bow, just an inclination of his head, which Kakashi returns. The boy continues on down the stairs without speaking. Kakashi waits a minute, and then goes up and through the door.

The room is a big one, with a tree in it. At the base, the old king of the boogeymen himself lies sleeping. Hooked up to the roots. He isn't alone. The First Hokage--Hashirama Senju--is there with him.

Theirs was the first choice that--Kakashi doesn't know what it did. Changed things somehow, from what they might have been. Because instead of striking that last killing blow, the First gave up his own life, and said to his friend--look, I'll go with you. We'll sleep and dream together.

So this is one of his trees, keeping the two of them alive. Just as they were when they went down together. It's a lucky thing. They were there, near enough, that Madara noticed it when that avalanche happened. And he stirred awake and went and fetched his descendant, from an otherwise certain death.

"Hey," Kakashi says.

"Mm," Obito replies sleepily. It's late, and he's lying down on the floor, eyes closed, with his head pillowed back against Madara's ankles.

"You showed the kid?"

"He asked. Who's the real boss around here, he said. That's pretty much what he said. So, I thought he'd like to see."

"Did it freak him out?"

"Itachi? No. You can't freak Itachi out. He's like... he's... I don't know. Nothing ever surprises him. He's always already guessed it might happen."

"What's the matter with you?"

"Nothing." Obito opens his eyes and gazes up blearily at Kakashi. Maybe it really is nothing. He might be tired. Or just in an odd mood--that happens, often enough. Kakashi stoops down and gets a hold on him, and drags him back up to his feet.

You don't spend a year in a cave with two living gods and come out unchanged. Obito sees the world in a way Kakashi can't. Things that operate in uniform ways for most other people just don't, for him. Probably, it has to do with his abilities. He can pull a living tree from nothing and send it hundreds of years into its own future, leave it grown enormously. He can blink himself out of one place and into another. Or make a ghost of himself, a thing no weapon, no hand can touch. So sure, all that makes him strange. For Obito, the very rules of time and space are just--a bit messed up. And he is, too.

Plus, Madara got a hold of him, for that year.

"It occurs to me," Obito says, as they stand side-by-side looking at the tree and its two grandmasters. "That this place might not be a healthy environment for a young boy to train in."

"Are you joking?"

"Sort of. I don't know. Do you think I should send him back to Leaf?"

"I think it's not really up to you."

"He's my cousin. I love him. That makes it up to me."

Kakashi hesitates, thinking the thing over. He lifts his head and looks over at Obito, and he sees his friend's mind working. How his awareness rolls back and forth, from his mad red eye to his calm dark one and back again.

"He clearly has the skill to be here," Kakashi says, at length. "And they paired him with Kisame. If it had been one of the others, I'd say yeah--it's a bad idea. But Kisame's all right. He'll look out for him."

"Because gigantic mass murdering fishmen are definitely good company for sensitive fourteen-year-olds."

"I would have _loved_ a bloodthirsty fishman for a friend, back when I was a sensitive fourteen-year-old. What, you wouldn't have?"

"I was more into these guys." Obito points upward. Kakashi tilts his head to look up into the branches of the big tree, where hollow false men are hanging like nightmarish fruit. The one right over them looks down--its face is a blasted tangle of twisting vines--toward them, and raises its hand and waves hello.

"Hm," Kakashi says, waving back.

\--------

The first time they tried to make love, it was a disaster. So much so that they actually haven't tried again since. Kakashi thinks they will, someday. But. Not yet.

In Rain, the nightmares are less frequent. But sometimes he still wakes with a start, and in the dark he's not entirely sure where or when he is, or whether the blood he can feel on his hands is real or only a memory. Taking a deep breath, he untangles himself from his sheets and sits up in a hurry.

"Bad dream or good dream?" Obito asks. He's over by the window. He does this--brings himself into Kakashi's bedroom uninvited in the night once in a while, and spooks around the place reading his books, eating his food, petting his dogs. "You were thrashing around mumbling a lot. I didn't know whether to wake you or not. Hey, look at this."

"What?"

"You don't need to get up. I'll show you."

Obito presses his hands and his unmasked face against the thick window pane. Kakashi's bedroom is high up in the Tower. It overlooks the city. He feels a pang in his skull, as their sharingan activates. A moment later, his vision doubles. There's no overlap exactly. It's that he is truly viewing two scenes at once, as if with two minds. His and Obito's. One, the darkened bedroom. Two, the sight from the window. Tangled, messy, drowned, beautiful Hidden Rain--and over it the constant downpour, the high heavy clouds. And, tonight, a lightning storm.

"Pretty," he remarks, watching what Obito sees. The silent, vast pound and shudder of electricity within the rushing clouds. A flash, a pause, a flash. Each pulse lights the whole world up, each darkness swallows it whole. Thunder hits and this high up, the whole Tower quakes and feels like it's about to fall.

Two of the dogs shoot from the floor up to the bed, and burrow under the covers. Obito releases the sharingan and comes over as well, and all Kakashi sees then is from his own perspective. A ragged, sad, splendid creature, approaching quietly to join him and his mutts in bed.


	3. Kisame

They find, as one year passes and then another, that they work well together. Each team in the organization has a specialty. There are the pairs that go out to do the heavy hitting, to utterly destroy a target. And then those that excel more at sneaking, thievery, espionage. Kisame and Itachi are versatile. They get the complex assignments. The ones that call for subtlety, cunning, and brute force all in careful combination. There is a hope and a cautious willingness shared between the two of them, at the start of their partnership. As time passes, it becomes deep mutual respect, and trust in the judgment and the skill of one another. And then something even more--which Kisame doesn't realize, until some punk gets lucky and nearly guts him on the road in the Land of Fang.

It was an ambush. None of the enemy survive. But they had surprise on their side, and as Kisame is sheathing Samehada he feels cold air hit his side in a way it shouldn't. The pain comes a moment later, and he looks down and sees how the black coat is slashed open wide, and the flesh torn deeply under that, and sighs. He hadn't noticed, during the fight. He brings a hand up to clutch the wound and it squishes, in an unpleasant way.

"Damn."

"Kisame," Itachi says, turning to look at him and noticing as well. "How bad is--"

And that's the last thing he hears, before the ground swings toward him and everything goes black.

\--------

He wakes up in a bed. It's the height of summer, but the air is cool, wherever they are. When he takes a deep breath he catches that salty tang that almost smells like home. Salt, the sea. Fang Country's got a lot of coastline. Kisame turns his head and looks over wooden framework, cracked plaster, brickwork. Cupboards. A single room, probably a waystation. A neutral spot, set up for traveling shinobi to stop at on long missions.

Itachi is seated in an upholstered chair beside the bed. Curled up, the way he does. Shoes kicked off, bare feet tucked under him, slouched over the arm of the furniture. A cat couldn't have folded itself up more neatly. Just his red eyes open, and he doesn't say anything as he lifts his head and stares at Kisame.

"How'd you carry me all by yourself?" Kisame asks him, half teasing.

"I didn't. I made the crows drag you."

"No."

"A lot of them." Often, Itachi doesn't smile, when he's joking. He has the driest, oddest sense of humor that Kisame's ever encountered. 

He looks down. His own coat is missing. The shirt is one he doesn't recognize, not torn. He drags it up past his waist and eyes the line of dark stitches beneath. Neat, sure suturing, and the wound clean and tight, free of any sign of infection. Kakuzu himself couldn't have done a better job.

"Thanks."

"You ought to be more careful." Itachi uncoils from his position on the couch. He leans over the arm of it, braces his hands on the mattress, and looks down at Kisame. So close that the black ponytail that slips over one shoulder brushes his cheek.

And he gets it, then. That his partner was worried for him. When did the two of them become friends? Kisame is sure he would have noticed, if it had happened all at once. So it must have come a bit at a time. Days spent together on the road, remarks that meant nothing at the time, a smile, a disagreement, meals shared. The sense of the other person that grew to become familiar, and then comforting.

He catches the black hair and draws it very lightly between his fingers. Something he's wanted to do for years. Is it really as sleek, as smooth as it looks? It is. Like crow feathers. As cool to the touch as water in a stream.

Seeking permission, he looks into Itachi's eyes. He's not afraid to do it. Maybe he should be. Itachi can drive a person mad, by looking at them. Or kill them. Kisame holds that deadly gaze as he brings his partner's long hair to his lips and kisses it.

It's impossible to surprise Itachi. He always knows what's coming before anyone else does. But there is a flash across his expression. The briefest, softest smile--a look of relief, of keen gratification. Like even though he knew this was coming, he was getting tired of waiting for it. He's glad it's finally here.

\--------

In their third year together, a mission takes them to the Mist. That dark and echoing place in its fog of twilight, full of ghosts. Kisame tries to warn Itachi about that. But you can't really explain such a thing, to another person. Nobody believes it until they see it. In Mist, footsteps follow you down old roads. Things seem to be there that aren't, when you get closer. Between the broad tall trunks of trees, or in the muffled silent damp of the village, people stand and watch you and they're just hallucination, tricks of the fog and of the mind. Sound too--talking, laughter. Sudden, out of nowhere. But it's not real.

Something invisible stumbles past them, as they come around the corner of a building and into the west district. Itachi jerks sideways with kunai in hand. After a moment, startled, he lowers the weapon and makes a little hiss of a sound, a single exhaled breath.

"What was it?" he asks.

"It's nothing." Kisame shrugs. This is home. He didn't even react to the sensation, himself. "This place is just haunted all to hell. Or, the Mist has produced some of the most famous illusionists in the world, and this kind of thing is just a trace left over from hundreds of years of genjutsu being practiced very hard and very well--if you prefer a more rational explanation."

"That's hardly more rational."

Again, Kisame shrugs.

It's a beautiful place. Sad and ancient--because people lived here in this spot a long, long time before it was established as a hidden village. Kisame loves it here. He always will. Wherever else life takes him, the Mist is his home. Surrounded by the hills and the deep woods and beyond that the restless tossing sea. You can't see the stars, here in Mist. It's like Rain that way. Instead, at night, light shimmers in halos from lanterns and out of stained-glass windows. It ripples on damp stonework paths. This is a village of bells, that's how time is kept--and so its aquatic darkness is full of their resonance, their golden, shuddering tolling.

\--------

Itachi is restless and pensive. Bothered. He vanishes a few times. Just steps lightly out the window without saying a word, and doesn't show back up until morning. Kisame doesn't ask where it is he's going.

"But there are no ghosts. Not really." He says one evening, suddenly.

"How do you know?"

Kisame is getting undressed and ready for bed, and turns to look over his shoulder at his partner. It's a rare sight. Someone who didn't know him wouldn't even notice how flustered he is.

"Why does it bother you so?" Kisame asks, genuinely puzzled.

"It doesn't."

"Something about them being dead?"

"That's not it."

"Well, then." He kick off his shoes and peels off his shirt, and sits on the edge of the bed. He drags his hand along both cheeks. There is another, private pleasure in visiting his homeland. In Rain, in most of the countries, it doesn't matter, he doesn't notice--but Kisame despises missions in the lands of Wind and Earth. There's no moisture in the air, there. And embarrassingly, his gill slits dry out and crack. It hurts. Here in Mist, half of what you're breathing is water. It's a bodily relief. A pliant easiness returns to every cell, every joint. Even with Itachi sulking and unsettled, it's hard to be in a bad mood.

"But have you ever met someone you knew? After they died?" his young partner says more quietly, almost uncertainly. And that gets Kisame's attention. Itachi is never uncertain about anything. "Does that happen, here?"

Kisame hesitates. "Sometimes."

"To you?"

"Once." Kisame frowns, and considers letting the waiting silence after that statement just go on without a better answer. "My sister," he says, at length. "She came back again, a few months after she died."

"Did it frighten you?"

"No. I was happy to see her. Wouldn't you be?"

Itachi's gaze drops down to the floor. A worried line appears, upon his fine brow. "I don't know," he responds, at length. "I don't have a sister. I have a brother."

"It's the same."

"Is it?"

"Yes. I've got one of those, too. He's not dead, though."

Itachi looks back up, surprised.

"You never asked," Kisame points out. "I wasn't always just a swordsman. Just the Monster of the Hidden Mist. I started out as someone's son and someone's sibling."

Silence, to that. But Itachi crosses the distance between them, raises one pale, deft hand, and touches his fingertips under the curve of Kisame's jaw, and the soft pad of his thumb to his lower lip.

\--------

Why they try what they do that particular night, Kisame isn't sure. Like his older cousin, maybe like all Uchiha, Itachi is prey to strange whims. But it's good. Different and the same, at once. The henge he uses is perfect as can be. A flawless female form. When they're done and sated, lying together afterward, he whispers close against Kisame's throat-- _kiss my eyes, kiss near them._

A bizarre request. But Kisame raises himself up on one elbow and looks down at his partner, and after a moment he leans forward. Itachi's eyes squeeze shut. He gives a quick inhalation and holds his breath, like he's expecting pain. Does he think Kisame would ever hurt him? Does he suspect betrayal?

To kiss those pale, cool eyelids. With the deadly eyes, the killing gaze beneath them. The bruised darkness, underneath. The temples to each side. The center of his brow. Kisame goes on until his partner is gasping beneath him, and those fine, thin little hands are fisted in his hair, trying to drag him closer.

\--------

So maybe what happens next began there, in haunted Mist, in those hours of careless tenderness. Because it was a place where memories lived and walked freely, where the past and the future peered in around foggy corners toward the present. Kisame didn't intend any of it. If Itachi did, if it was a desire of his, a plan--he doesn't say. Doesn't mention anything about it at all in fact, for months. By the time Kisame finally finds out--well, there's nothing to be done about it. And not a lot of time left to decide whether to keep the whole thing a secret or not.

\--------

They go out on separate missions, and meet up again at an inn by the border. Itachi is waiting for Kisame by the side of a road, sheltered under a tree, keeping out of the rain. Well, mostly out of it. When Kisame steps near and opens the side of his coat to his partner, the small body that presses up near his own is cold and wet.

"Ack--careful."

"What got you?"

"Kunai." A few of them. But the blades weren't poisoned, so at least there's that. 

The two of them head down the road toward the inn and let themselves in by way of a tree growing nearby, and a window Itachi left open to the room he'd already rented. He goes first, quick and catlike. Kisame follows behind.

"How'd your mission go?"

"Well, I didn't get stuck full of holes."

"Better than mine, then."

"I had to cut it short, actually." Itachi wafts toward the table and lights the lamp there. He retreats to the bathroom and returns barefoot, leaving glistening wet footprints across the hardwood floor, carrying towels in his arms. One, he passes to Kisame. The other he uses to begin padding his dark hair dry. Slow, distracted. He's looking at the floor and off toward the window, shifting his attention around with well-calculated indifference.

"Ah?" Kisame asks simply. "Why so?"

"There was an unexpected complication."

"Very vague, Itachi. You know I can't follow what you mean, when you hint around like this. I need you to just blurt it out, plain and simple."

A soft, amused huff of breath. Itachi approaches and stands on tip-toe, and Kisame bends with a crooked smile and allows his partner to ruffle one of the towels over his head. Like he's a big dog, come in out of the rain. A mutt that needs to be dried off quick before it shakes and sends water flying everywhere. There's a certain playfulness in Itachi that only sneaks out in unguarded moments like this. Kisame takes advantage, when he can. He puts his own hands up on the towel. Drapes it over both of them, fluffs it on the silken dark hair. Makes a tent of it, over his own bowed head and Itachi's. Beneath the dripping cloth, he dares a bit further, and snatches a kiss. He peels the cloak over Itachi's slender shoulders, and drops it to the floor. Brings his hands up between them, and--

\--and pauses, there. Startled.

"The henge, again?" he asks. Because the form beneath the cloak is definitely a female one. He hadn't noticed before. The baggy black cloak disguised it. And Itachi's basic features are, in whatever form he takes, fairly androgynous.

"Not again. It's the same one."

"From Mist? You never changed back?" All Kisame can think at first is that it's some kind of weird Uchiha thing. Well, people from Leaf, they switch around a lot anyway. That's the rumor. But he knows for a fact that Uchiha don't stay properly, reliably one gender or another. That time in Mist wasn't the first time Itachi showed a female aspect--only the first time he'd wanted them to make love, that way. Obito and Madara both switch around unpredictably. It is the same, Kakashi confided to him once, with the whole clan. Part of their strangeness. The normal lines between what's male and what's female are blurry, for the Uchiha.

"I tried. I couldn't."

"Couldn't what?"

"Change back."

And it's there, right there, that Kisame picks up the hint. Realizes that there is something urgent going on. Something he doesn't know. Wasn't told--no, is _being told_ , right this moment.

He noticed the breasts, the hips. Now, he sees what should have been obvious right away, on an otherwise thin little form. How the belly curves outward, just slightly. A tight firm bulge. The last time Kisame saw this henge, that wasn't there. It certainly wasn't. And it takes him a while, staring down, to really get what it means.

The words he tries to speak come out strangled, and he takes a step back. The kunai that hit him in the back a week ago didn't surprise him as much as this does. Nothing, _nothing_ has ever surprised him, like this. It can't be true. And what if it is? It is. His mind goes utterly blank. He can only take in the sight, then look up to meet Itachi's gaze, then look back down again.

"What?" he asks, slightly desperate.

"I thought you ought to know." Those thin, pale, beloved hands fold neatly over the swollen, pregnant stomach. His expression is utterly serene, his tone as quiet and rational as ever. "That's all. I don't expect... well. Of course, you know, you may do as you like."

"I may... give me a moment." He brings one hand up and scrubs it hard over his face. Holds it over his eyes, retreats to the darkness under his palm, for a bit. The room is silent. He can hear the wind outside. The soft, rhythmic drip of water, from the edge of Itachi's sleeve to the floor. This is too much. Stupidly, it crosses Kisame's mind that a boy--a girl? a person, a young mother--his friend, his lover, and their unborn child--ought not to have been waiting in the rain, ought not to have gotten so wet and chilled.

"You're not obligated. Not in any way."

"I can't believe you just said that, Itachi."

"You aren't, though." There is a pause, a tension. Itachi was expecting a different reaction than this, Kisame realizes. What? He'd made some plan already. Put things all together, thought out the future and how everything was going to go. And whatever he predicted Kisame was going to think or feel, or do, he was off the mark. Now he's recalculating.

He's so arrogant. Maybe the most arrogant person Kisame has ever met--and most of the time, it doesn't bother him that much. Just once in a while. It gets to him, to be so close to someone who always thinks he's ten steps ahead of the game. Who believes so completely that he knows Kisame's mind and his heart better than Kisame himself does. It's not like Itachi isn't right, most of the time, in his predictions. It's just that sometimes he's wrong--and those times tend to be the ones that count the most.

"This is a dangerous world," Kisame says, a bit strained, after the two of them have stood in silence a while. "It seems to me that a child would have a better chance in it with two people to look out for it. Not just one."

The slightest shift in Itachi's posture. A slow loosening of the tightness in his shoulders. "I don't think you understand how much trouble an Uchiha child might... _will_ be."

"Yes, well. I'm not committing to an Uchiha child--I'm committing to a Hoshigaki, aren't I?" Kisame steps forward with arms out, to take his friend against him again. This secretive, cold, wet morsel of a person. Or two people, he supposes, at the moment. One well-known, one yet tiny and hidden.

The worst part of this, he thinks--is that Obito will have to find out, and he isn't even sure what kind of reaction he might have, except that it will probably be explosive. The safest thing will be to try and get Kakashi in on the whole thing first, and hope that he can control whatever damage his partner unleashes after that.


	4. Obito

Sometimes, Obito thinks he _is_ Madara. He knows that's crazy--he knows _he's_ crazy. But that's just how it is. If he could undo everything that was done to him, he totally would. Go back to the beginning, the time before the accident, and snatch his own child self away from everything that happened next. He'd get Kakashi and Rin too. All three of them, and if he could he'd warn them, he'd save them. Take all of them to the far other side of the world and leave them there, on a nice quiet island or something, and they could grow up to be farmers. Or maybe he'd lock them all away together in Kamui's dimension. Doesn't get a lot safer than that. Except there's no food or water there. And he happens to know for a fact that, after a couple of years, all that white stone and black sky and silence gets kind of depressing. Time doesn't pass in Kamui the way it does outside. Obito can shut his eyes, and go spend a decade lost over there, and when he opens his eyes again in the normal world only a moment has passed. A blink, a breath. And everything is just how he left it.

He doesn't really like doing stuff like that. But he does sometimes, anyway. It's part of being an Uchiha. Something other people don't get, about the clan. Kamui is real. You die there, you're dead. But there are myriad other worlds--and they're mental realms, dreamlands, tricks. The Uchiha are the most highly skilled illusionists in the world. The ones who are really good with stuff like that, if you can talk them into it, you can look into their eyes and they'll take you away anywhere. You could spend a whole lifetime together, any lifetime you wanted to, while in the mortal world only a few seconds of staring go by.

His aunt Mikoto used to do it for them, when they were kids. Not years and years worth of illusion. But if the cousins all got together and begged her, once in a while she'd give in. She would do them each one at a time. And so you waited, you know, while she gently took each child's face in her hands and bent down and stared into their eyes, with her soft smile and her dark hair falling all around her shoulders. A moment would pass, and then another, and they gasped and smiled and staggered back when she let them go. When she got around to you, her hands against your cheeks were a thrill. The light, sweet touch, the coolness of her skin. She had a rosewater scent, Aunt Mikoto, and that came all around you as you locked your gaze with hers.

And then, just like that, the two of you were somewhere else. You were standing beside her with your hand in hers, and the two of you were barefoot next to the ocean at sunset. Or standing in a field of white flowers that went on, on, on for miles, to the edges of the horizon. Or she'd do something really wild. Take you miles over the earth, to stand upon the air, between the stars--and those ones, those were Obito's favorites, because they were fast and free and full of laughter. And way up there, Mikoto was like a goddess. A woman made up of the sky herself, of moonlight.

Those were his only real experiences with shared illusion, before the avalanche. Mikoto's kindness. Or fooling around with other kids, grabbing one another's faces and staring hard and co-creating an illusion of being heroes, or enemies, or married, or whatever. The way other normal kids--not Uchiha--might play war, or play house, using their imaginations.

It was all different, with Madara.

"Such things... it's not a _game_ ," the man hissed, the first time the subject was raised.

So often, he and the First were asleep. And that left Obito alone with the plantmen. They couldn't help it. Though age had never quite caught up to either of them, the tree was all that was keeping them both alive. They had their own world. A dream that they shared which never ended--a place where they were happy, where they were gods. It took a lot of energy, for either of them to wake and return to the mundane world even for a minute or two. When they did, Obito rushed to them. He was just a kid, and he was lonely. That sort of overrode his fear and the common sense.

"Sharing time in illusion, touching mind-to-mind, is a clan technique meant to keep ancient wisdom and skill from being lost," Madara went on, irritated. "I am horrified. I am _disgusted_ to know that it has become a party trick."

"Madara," Hashirama chided. The two of them were seated at the roots of the tree. They looked so casual. Like two ordinary jonin on a lunch break together, or something. Except that their clothes were outdated, and worn by time. And the way they spoke was odd. They both had these accents, this dialect they shared. Intonations and sayings that Obito was unfamiliar with, when they first dug him up--but that he was copying without meaning to, by the time he left the cave.

"How would you feel to know your clan techniques had been watered down to pointlessness? I bet they _have_. Well, child? What is mokuton used for, these days?"

"I don't know. Barely anyone has it. And it's not trees it's just... wood." Obito hesitated. "I guess they use it to put up the framing for houses, and stuff. And there's some guy in the shop district who makes artisan spoons I think?"

Hashirama made a small, pained noise. He had, Obito knew, used the same ability to create the very forest that stretched for miles around their home. That hid them, that harbored the precious village deep at its center.

"I'll show you how shared illusion is meant to be," Madara said, decisively.

"Wait," Hashirama said. Like a warning, a cautioning. He glanced uncertainly at Obito, and then at Madara.

"He's an Uchiha. It's his birthright."

"You'll traumatize him."

" _Puh-lease_. Obito, darling, sweetheart--my boy, my child. Could you possibly get any more traumatized by this than you already are?"

"I don't think so."

"There, see, Hashi?"

Obito should have said no to the whole thing. The First's reluctance ought to have tipped him off, that it was a bad idea to go into a shared illusion with Madara. Since that was how Hashirama had spent about the last hundred years, or however long, and nobody knew more about it than he did. But Obito would have agreed to pretty much anything, to keep them awake and with him for a bit longer.

\--------

So began his training. Shared illusion as it had been done back in the old days. Each time he woke, Madara called Obito over. He did the thing Mikoto did too, he put his hands on Obito's face. But his grip was always hard. It was a hundred times more threatening, more intimate than anything Obito had ever experienced before. Nobody in his life, up to that point, had ever clutched him so. Madara never seemed to mean him harm. Never, never--not once. The damage just happened because he couldn't help it. He was one of those people who brought destruction to _everything_ he loved the most.

He took Obito back into his own past. They went through hour after hour, in all the vivid detail of waking life. So it was like it was really happening. He wasn't with Madara, in those dreams--he was Madara. And he hated and loved the world of the past just as Madara had. He lost each of his brothers. He found his golden friend, his other half, the very twin of his soul--a man who could pull living trees from nothing.

The point was that, in sharing his life, Madara taught Obito all that he had been taught. And it was more complicated than that. Because much of Madara's own training had come to him from teachers who had shared their own lives, through illusion--and their teachers had also, and theirs before him. It was a tremendous gift. All those lifetimes, that knowledge, the things his ancestors had known.

But it was confusing. Time never worked the same way again, when Madara was finished. All those memories. Things that happened a thousand years ago. And things sometimes that Obito wasn't sure had happened yet at all. Memories out of the future. Not precognitions, exactly--just certainties. A sense of the lineage that ran backwards into the past, and forward into all the years to come. All his teachers--men and women he had never met, but whose lives he had shared. And in a way, maybe they had been aware of him too. Felt him, in his own present--their future. Dreamed him in reverse, though they would die a long time before he was born.

That was behind. What's ahead? Obito got startling flashes of it sometimes. He's never had a student of his own before. Someone he could pass on the living history of the clan and the great storage of their techniques to. But he knows there will be such a person. Or maybe more than one--and they'll have students of their own. The line will continue. Because he remembers them, all those to come, in reverse. They belong to him. And he to them.

\--------

"The damage to the north atrium--"

"I'm sorry."

"Will be enormously expensive, and take months to repair--"

"I admit that I overreacted."

"If I could, Obito, I'd throw you out." Yahiko scrubs both hands hard across his face. Beside him, Konan just looks slightly weary. Nagato keeps sighing.

"Wow. That's a little harsh. It's not like I knocked the whole Tower down."

Yahiko pulls his hands from his face and stares at him. Outraged. About what exactly, Obito isn't sure. The damage isn't so bad... well, all right, it's sort of bad. But it's not like it was a room anyone ever used much, anyway.

"Look," Nagato cuts in, soft and reasonable. Obito isn't sure exactly why he sometimes wants to punch Nagato in the face. It's an entirely inappropriate impulse. Of the three of them, Nagato is the gentlest, the most reasonable. Nearly apologetic actually, in his mannerisms--and maybe that's the part that Obito finds a little grating. He isn't sure. "Look, now," Nagato goes on. "Itachi is going to spend some time in Leaf. Not on a mission, obviously. Just to visit. Why don't you go with him? It will give you two time to work things out."

"There's nothing that needs to be worked out. I told you--I just overreacted."

"Will you go?"

Obito hesitates. "Who else is going?"

"Kisame will be in Whirlpool, on an assignment with Deidara. If that's what you're asking. Kakashi can go with you if he wants to."

"Well," Obito says, not quite willing to commit yet. But he supposes he will. He never turns down chances to go back and visit Leaf for a while. He doesn't want to live there. Not with Rin and his grandmother gone. But he loves it, all the same. It's his home. The most precious place in the world. Closed up by the towering boughs of the trees, glimmering under the wide blue sky. And maybe they're right. Maybe a teensy bit of working things out with Itachi wouldn't go amiss. He should probably apologize at least, for freaking out and blowing apart the north atrium, when he should have just said _congratulations_ or something.

\--------

He goes up to say goodbye to Madara. The old bastard, the monster, asleep with his lover in the cool dripping dark of their bower. Obito sits down beside him, and bends over and kisses his ancestor's sly half-smiling lips.

Madara takes a breath, and his red eyes slant open beneath his dark eyelashes.

"I'm visiting Leaf for a while. On mandatory vacation because I destroyed the north atrium and Yahiko is mad about it. You want me to bring you anything back?"

"Those candy things. The colorful ones, with the shapes."

"That crap's so cheap. You sure you don't want me to raid the catacombs for forbidden scrolls or something?"

"Why? I wrote most of those, I already know what they say. Bring me the candy."

"Fine." Obito busies himself for a moment, arranging the folds of Madara's dark robe more neatly around him. Like he was a very young person, or a very old one, unable to do such things for himself. In fact, both he and Hashirama are young and strong. A few years older than Obito himself, if even that. The tree that keeps them both alive and dreaming is miraculous in many ways.

"You seem upset," Madara says. One pale, delicate, scarred hand raises and touches Obito's cheek. Obito wants to resist leaning his face into that touch, but he can't. Madara's love is poison. But it's love, still.

"I had a stupid week."

"Well," the man says, settling back down, closing his eyes. "If it ever gets to be too much for you, you know where you're welcome."

In the dream. The private, perfect place of peace that Madara and Hashirama built. The mass illusion, the other world. It's a beautiful invitation. The thought of hooking up to the roots and going in with both of them used to really frighten Obito. It seemed too much like suicide. Letting himself and his whole life go. And how could he be sure that he wouldn't just dissolve, totally cease to exist, in their dream? They're both so much _more_ than he is. They could burn him away.

But as he gets older, the whole prospect is becoming more appealing. He's less afraid of losing himself. So maybe--maybe someday.

\--------

The Uchiha don't stick as male or female, the way people in other clans do. They henge back and forth. It's a so long and natural a tradition that it's just not the big deal that outsiders always assume it is. They're a fairly androgynous lot, anyway. You can switch gender as an Uchiha, and most of the time nobody outside the clan will even notice.

Point of fact--Fugaku and Mikoto switch, all the time. Nobody outside the district seems to get that. It's the clan's own private little joke. That sometimes their leaders are two women. One grim and somber, the other wise and merry. Sometimes they're both men. And sometimes they're one or the other. It's expected, in a marriage--it makes the bond deeper, it keeps things interesting.

So nobody is surprised, the night they arrive, about Itachi being female. The pregnancy doesn't shock them either--Uchiha are sensual creatures. Love means a lot to them, in all its shades and hues. The issue, the awkward tension of the situation, is that the father is about as far outside the bloodline as it's possible to get.

"Of course..." Fugaku begins, over dinner. He sighs, looks toward his wife for a suggestion, and then glances back up at Itachi. He's not an unkind or unfeeling person. Just so stoic, so silently anxious, so bound by the rules of long tradition. "If it had been the two of you..." His gaze flicks between Itachi and Obito. "But a man from Mist? That's so far removed from us."

"If the child develops the sharingan, of course that will change things." Mikoto adds.

"I understand." Itachi has just gone on calmly eating, through all of this. Even the part of the meal where Shisui shoved his plate away from him, got up without saying anything, and slammed the door so hard on his way out of the house that the windows shook. It's still not the worst family dinner Obito has ever sat through. But it's up there. He wishes Kakashi hadn't ditched him to go drinking in the village proper. No--he wishes he had done the same, actually. He could be hollering in a bar watching Gai and Asuma arm wrestle each other, right now. Instead he's here.

"Whatever the case," Fugaku says. "We're pleased, too. We truly are."

"I understand," Itachi repeats. And he probably does. Obito, who's crazy, can even see it. How his aunt and uncle are excited by the prospect of a grandchild. Even one that they just spent an hour and a half tactfully forbidding from the clan and the Uchiha surname. Whoever this kid is, it will be a Hoshigaki. It will have this family's affection, though not their total blessing.

\--------

"Hey," Obito calls down to Kakashi, later that night. He's up in a tree. The man, ambling along back toward the district with his hands in his pockets, looks up and spots him. A moment later he tenses, and then springs up the trunk and takes a seat lightly beside Obito on a high branch.

"What's all this?" He knocks a few empty bottles down from between them.

"It was a stressful dinner. How are all the real people in Leaf doing?"

"Same as always." Kakashi squints, off toward a spot in the distance. Two small figures beside the lake. One shouting, pacing back and forth. The other standing off to one side, calm and patient as ever.

"Shisui and Itachi," Obito tells him.

"What are they fighting about?"

"What do you think?"

"I don't see why everyone cares so much," Kakashi remarks, settling back. Obito passes him a bottle that's not empty yet, and he sips from it. "It's just a baby."

"How is that _not_ a big deal?"

"It's just born and you love it and try to keep it alive. So what?"

"How'd you feel if it was us? Our kid?"

"Same. I wouldn't care."

"Jackass. Aw, hey look, they've got to the making up part." Obito leans forward, getting a better look through the trees at the two figures in the distance. Shisui slumping. Itachi going to him, putting his hands on his shoulders. The two of them then facing one another, embracing. It's sweet. Those two--they've been so close all their lives. Which is what the fight was about, probably. Because the whole clan expected that they'd pair up, eventually--that they'd take Fugaku and Mikoto's place, eventually, as the heads of the clan. And probably that _will_ still happen. But this whole thing with Kisame is an unexpected complication. And though the Uchiha do not expect monogamy of one another particularly, still it was all something of a betrayal. But Shisui is kindhearted. He'll get over it. And he'll like Kisame, anyway, when they eventually meet. That will make everything easier.

\--------

Weeks later, the lot of them are by the side of that same lake. It's autumn and the leaves are red and orange. They cover the ground and fill up the branches of all the trees, and you can smell the sweetness of them. The village is a forested place. Full of this stuff.

Sasuke has a golden-haired friend he brought along. Minato's son, who has ambled off along the lakeshore with Kakashi. And so the rest of them--the group of cousins--find themselves alone together. There's this sense of strength you get, in a flock of your age-mates. The people you ran wild with as a child. Nobody else in the world, not even a lover, will ever know you the way siblings and close cousins do.

"What about something with _sky_ in it?"

"Or _snow_. It's going to be born at the end of winter, right?"

" _Flower_." Obito suggests. And then, hesitating. "Or _bell_."

He almost doesn't want to give that one up, as a possible meaning to work into the child's name. Because it belongs to Rin, whose name was just that--the sound of a bell. And he wants it to be only hers. And he thinks, vaguely, that if he ever _did_ have a child of his own, he wants to keep _bell_ specially for that person. He's lying with his hands folded behind his head, watching the vivid blue sky and its towering white clouds. He twists a bit to look over his shoulder, where Itachi is sitting back against the base of a tree and Shisui and Sasuke are both leaning on either side of him. Nobody seems that enthused about the _bell_ suggestion, which is a relief.

"I like... _quiet_." Itachi says. And of course he would like to work in an element like that. It's tasteful. But then also, it is Obito's private opinion that the child might have been conceived during that long mission in Mist. And that is such an utterly, eerily silent land, except for all the weird echoes.

"Shizuma," Sasuke suggests.

Itachi puts a hand over his stomach. The roundness is just beginning to be really obvious, impossible to hide. "Shizuma," he repeats thoughtfully.

\--------

Later, when they're back in Rain--when autumn has ended, and what that means in this village is that the fountains and canals are beginning to freeze over--Obito sits on the couch in Itachi's apartment, in the Tower, and they watch sheeting droplets hit the windows. The lamps are off. The room is dark, except for the glow from the kitchen. Where, shirtless and humming now and again, Kisame is moving around doing something or other. When he crosses past the doorway, Obito glances over. All that muscle. And the scars--including a few new ones from the mission in Whirlpool--across his chest and back. Delicious. 

"I can see why," he mentions.

"Hm?" Itachi's eyes were closed. He opens them again, and glances sideways at Obito. "Why what?"

"Why." Obito nods toward the doorway, and the big handsome monster in the other room.

"Oh. Yes, well."

"Hey..." Obito lowers his voice. He leans a little closer, and watches Itachi stir from his doze and regard him with wary bemusement. "Hey, there's a thing. A thing I want to show you. You want to see now?"

"Not really."

"I mean _show_ you." Obito taps beneath his Uchiha eye, the dangerous one.

Itachi considers the offer silently. Trying to figure it out. Guessing all the things Obito might be trying to get at. At length, he gives the slightest nod. Maybe he's curious.

Obito leans forward. Puts his arms around his cousin, so that he can feel the delicate smallness of him. And he sneaks a hand over the big, heavy swell of the belly--because it's weird, so weird, and it disturbs and delights him, to think of the child in the womb, to trace his fingers over something so upsetting, lovely and insane. They lock gazes, and Obito reaches out to the other mind and pulls it into his own, and closes the illusion around them both.

It just came to him, one day. The way things out of time sometimes do. A snatch of what's to come. It's only a few moments of illusion. No more than a sense. But it seemed right to share it. The lithe shinobi. With aquatic silver eyes, gill slashes over each cheek. But pale as moonlight too, and with a big mess of dark hair, and a familiar fineness to his features. You can see the Uchiha blood, in this handsome young man of the Mist. A calm, sure smile. The grace and strength. A pale hand closed around the hilt of Samehada, his father's sword. Just a glimmer, a dream of who Shizuma Hoshigaki will be.

Obito doesn't know why it came to him. Or if it's necessarily true--because he's nuts, and maybe it's just his imagination. But maybe he'll know that young man, someday. Maybe they'll mean something to each other, when Obito's a lot older and the world's a different sort of place.

When the illusion ends, Itachi hides his face in his hands. Kisame comes into the room and sets three bowls of hot something-or-other down on the end table and rushes forward, concerned.

"Ah, shit. Obito, what did you do?"

But Itachi reaches up and grabs onto the man and kisses him hard, which throws off the irritated grab Kisame was making in Obito's direction. By the time they separate, Itachi is flawlessly poised again. Neither smiling nor frowning. Serene.

"Thank you," he says, simply.

"Hey, no problem."

"For what?" Kisame asks, glancing between the two of them. "What did he do?"

They don't say. Perhaps Itachi will share the illusion later. Obito isn't sure. His cousin has always loved secrets. And this one is only harmless, and hopeful.


End file.
